New Independent Films

I recently returned from the Torino Film Festival, a festival which I adore for its dedication to art cinema, where I was engaged as a juror. As my job was to watch competition films, I saw more new films in a week than I normally do in a year, and so I got an instant impression of the themes and styles of new independent work. I must add that my innocence in this regard is much like a time traveler who has recently found themselves in the twenty-first century, as I've spent so much time studying classic films that my viewing of newer independent work has been somewhat lacking.

To begin with, let me say that although the films seemed very disparate on the surface, what was most striking was the similarities between many of the films. If I were to catalogue what seems to be the aim of many of the films, it would seem to be to capture a certain sense of virtuousness through a means of storytelling that leaves out the ordinary parts of stories, and leaves in the parts that are in between. This is in an attempt, I gather, to surprise us by calling our attention to the truth in the minutae of everyday reality.

Indeed, in most of the films, this search for the "truth," coming directly from neo-realist tradition, seemed like a primary concern. Truth in acting is equated with creating unglamorous and inarticulate characters; truth in lighting is achieved by trying to light as little as possible; truth in storytelling is telling the non-dramatic bits of a story; truth in editing is trying not to edit at all, as this pollutes the purity of events as they happen in real time; truth in camerawork is the hand-held camera, without the intervention of storyboards, tripods and cranes; truth in writing is to tell as little as possible, so as not to trample on the viewer's own impressions. Also, incoherence often seemed to be aimed at, I suppose in order to reflect directly the incoherence of experience, and the impossibility of getting at meaning. As well as direct meaning, symbolism seemed to be an element that was avoided (when symbolism, artifice, and self-dramatization were used as devices, they were frowned upon).

The other thing I noticed was that direct pleasure was avoided most of the time, and in its place was the indirect pleasure of self-denial or self-immolation, and the sado-masochistic pleasure in the starkness or ugliness itself. So in the end, this cinema was more striking in terms of what it rejected than in terms of what it embraced: rejection of artifice and all overt devices, rejection of overt pleasure, rejection of meaning. What I was often left with was a cleverness in the filmmaker's ability to seem invisible as a stylist or creator of meaning. So it's a cinema of negation, of what's left when content, form, and desire are taken away.

Looking at all of the films, and at one Nicholas Ray film I caught in between other screenings, which approached cinema from exactly the opposite direction, I felt a pang of grief. I'm so fascinated by older forms of cinema, in which all possibilities were...well, possible. I have literally been told that it's "impossible" to do cinema in a pre-World war II Style, and the reasons why have been explained to me: "because of the way consciousness has been fragmented...because old ways of thinking about identity have been exploded." In Deleuze's books Cinema I and Cinema II, he talks about the postwar shift in cinema, in which the history of cinema can almost be divided into two halves. Deleuze speaks about an older cinema of movement and a newer cinema of time. Neo-realism is discussed, as well as the French new wave, and these forms have remained entrenched in art cinema forever since, seeking new ways to produce glimmers of meaning outside of narrative conventions, always in search of the new. And yet avant-garde practice, up until now, has rejected the previous generation's truth in favor of its own truth, often looking back to much older forms to do so. The newer cinema is almost beyond reproach, as one is seen as a philistine if one questions it, whereas anything else of a more sensuous or direct nature is instantly mistrusted

Looking at the Nicholas Ray film, "Party Girl," through the eyes of contemporary festival audiences used to this new cinema, I couldn't help but thinking that the Ray film would seem ludicrous, and just WRONG, to them. Full of artificial pleasures, in the form of sets lit with three-point classical lighting, rear-projection in moving cars, the smashingly beautiful and almost otherworldly Cyd Charisse, characters in general that are more glamorous, daring, or attractive than we are, fantastic musical numbers, colorful gangsters, very carefully scripted dialogue and camera work, heavy-handed symbolism, all the dramatic bits left in, and everything else left out, a sweeping musical score highlighting the drama, fantastic costumes, color-coordinated, and a strong moral ending.

While I deeply enjoy "serious" art cinema, I am also a hopeless decadent. I refuse to reject entertaining material on the grounds that it's unimportant artistically. I have come around to the other side of art, in which I can find momentous meaning in the choreography of Cyd Charisse's overwhelmingly erotic dance, in much the same way that Apollinaire found more meaning in the lace panties of music hall dancers than in the greatest works of art in museums.

Si J'Etais Blanche!

I just got a new Josephine Baker CD, and I've become obsessed in particular with a song called "Si J'Etais Blanche!" (If I Were White!) that I've transcribed with what I believe are the CORRECT lyrics, or "paroles" (other versions online are a little off), and translated below. It's a fabulous song, and one that I'd be interested in performing in the right setting.

I've always loved Josephine Baker, and French music hall and early jazz shows in general, but listening to her again is revelatory. I hear in her voice, in the orchestrations and playing, and in the general ambiance, the feeling of Paris in the '20s and '30s, of the excitement of the transition between vaudeville and jazz styles, and the playfulness of the entertainment. It's all so sexy, so coded, so full of joie de vivre, and represents all types of new cultural transgressions.

Josephine Baker in particular is able to represent these transgressions, being a black performer who was at once feverishly admired and thought of as singularly "other." She both embraced and rejected stereotypes of herself as a fabulous exotic in the "tumulte noir" which gripped Paris in the '20s, in which Parisians became entranced by all things African and African American. Picasso and Matisse were doing artwork inspired by African sculpture, blacks and whites alike performed in blackface in revues to appreciative audiences, and the bored and decadent white world became suddenly alive to a new frontier of expression, casting off traditional European forms in the pursuit of something more natural and spontaneous.

Josephine Baker represented the sexualized and totally charming female who could bridge black and white cultures, with her ability to both sing like a bird in a quintessentially French style, and to dance with extraordinary expression and agility, in a mix of jazz baby and "native" styles. She was a completely invented creature, with her dark skin and shimmering satin gowns, native Haitian costumes, or black tie and tails, representing nature and culture, American and European, male and female, and even human and animal, with her performing as a bird in a cage, or being constantly compared to a beautiful panther.

The music hall and cabaret were places where transgressive ideas about gender could be expressed - there were many female and male cross-dressers who sang witty and bawdy songs - and also for race-bending. Even the most racist whites in America and Europe could not deny the force of jazz, and of the black performers who burst onto the entertainment scene with so much force and talent that they could not be ignored. But whereas in America the shows were segregated and being black was thought of as a misfortune, in Paris Josephine Baker became a woman to be frankly admired. Her image was everywhere, even promoted through products such as skin-darkening lotion and hair pomade with her picture on them, so that the women of Paris could emulate her.



While Josephine Baker performed in blackface like other black and white performers, she embraced the African stereotype with her own brand of irony, reclaiming it for herself, and also one-upped everyone when she performed "Si J'Etais Blanche!" in white-face and a blonde wig. This song was a challenge to her projected image as an "exotic," and showed that she could create her image as she pleased, like any great white performer.

Although the lyrics speak about a wistful desire to be white, they also proclaim the superiority of having dark skin, and of not having to go out in the sun like Europeans in order to attain a beautiful color. The reason in the end for wanting to be white is so "that I will please you more," and not from any inner sense of inferiority. So it is really a protest against racism, and a plea to have herself be considered on the same level a a white woman.

The lyrics, song, and translation follow:

SI J’ÉTAIS BLANCHE

(Bobby Falk / Leo Lelièvre / Henri Varna)
1932

Je voudrais être blanche
Pour moi quel bonheur
Si mes seins et mes hanches
Changent de couleur

Les Parisiens à Juan-les-Pins
Se faisaient droit
Au soleil d’exposer
Leur amour un peu noir

Moi pour être blanche
J’allais me roulant
Parmi les avalanches
En haut du Mont Blanc

Ce stratagème
Donne un petit rigole
J’avais l’air dans la crème
D’un petit pruneau

Étant petite avec chagrin
J’admirais dans les magasins
La teinte pâle de poupées blanches

J’aurais voulu leur ressembler
Et je disais à l’air accablé
Me croyant toute seule brune au monde

Au soleil c’est par l’extérieur
Que l’on se dore
Moi c’est la flamme de mon cœur
Qui me colore

Faut-il que je sois blanche
Pour vous plaire mieux

Listen to song:


IF I WERE WHITE

I’d love to be white
What a joy for me
If my breasts and my thighs
Changed color suddenly

The Parisians at Juan-Les Pins
Can have their fun
Exposing loves already blackened
To the sun

To make myself white
I went to the Alps
And rolled in the snow there
But it didn’t help

I was no closer
To my little dream
I merely looked like a prune
In a dish of cream

When I was a girl I sadly admired
All the dolls I saw in stores
With skin so pale and white, unlike my own

I would have liked to look like them
And I said with a defeated air
I felt like the only brown girl in the world

It’s in the sun that others
Get a healthy glow
But for me, it’s the flame of my heart
That colors me so

I must be white so I will please you more!



I've always been fascinated with early jazz examples where race is highlighted, because the worst thing about being on an "other" race is your invisibility culturally. And since the '30s is my favorite cultural and aesthetic era, I'm always excited by images, for instance, of sexy non-white females such as Lena Horne in Cabin in the Sky, or Anna Mae Wong in Shanghai Express. Strangely enough, I even like it when white women play sexualized "orientals," such as Ruby Keeler playing the Chinese courtesan Shanghai Lil in Footlight Parade, because the depiction represents a white fantasy or longing to be like the other.

I suppose the interest in performers such as Josephine Baker came directly from the interest in American jazz culture, and by the same token the interest in Anna Mae Wong and other Chinese things in the '30s came from art-deco, which has may Chinese motifs. There is a Noel Coward song that interests me called "Half-Caste Woman," all about a half-Asian woman in a "shimmering gown." One of the lines is "Half-caste woman, what are your slanting eyes waiting and hoping to see?"

I remember watching Vaginal Davis perform with the Velvet Hammer a few years ago in blackface doing a vaudeville number, and I will never forget the power of that performance. There was such a sense of reclaiming the minstrel show for himself as a vehicle for expression, and there was so much anger, humor, and energy in the show that very powerful feelings were stirred up. I imagine some of the early blackface jazz shows to have been like this, with both blacks and whites trying to sort out stereotypes and differences through entertainment, love, hate, and discomfort. They are too often seen much too simply as direct attempts at defining the other in a racist way, but it's much more complicated than that.

I've included here a link to a number Josephine Baker did in Princesse Tam-Tam, that shows the Parisians' simultaneous fascination, envy, and revulsion for a totally "natural" and spontaneous creature, that offends their sense of propriety, but that they can't peel their eyes away from. Far from being a race-related transgression, Baker's transgression in this scene is totally sex-related: she is simply too frankly sexual for high-society Paris to deal with. And of course, as everyone knows, in the movies anyway, sex appeal is a very GOOD thing! Of course her spontaneity does come partly form being "natural," but this was after all the first sexual revolution in America and Europe, the sexual revolution of the roaring '20s.



I'm shocked to realize that I haven't write a blog in long, but in the meantime I've finished my feature script for THE LOVE WITCH, and I'm designing the production now through sketches. I'm also planning on shooting a short film or two on Super 8mm or 16mm, just to get myself back into production in a gentle way. I'll write more about all of this soon!

Hardly Working

I just saw the Jerry Lewis movie “Hardly Working.” I must saw, I was completely floored. I was instantly reminded of Chaplin’s “Limelight.” Some would say this is an outrageous comparison, but I don’t think so. They are both films wherein great aging clowns take a bitter and poignant look at themselves, and at their lives spent as clowns in the midst of a changing audience and landscape.

Lewis’ film is an abject fantasy about what would happen if he could no longer be a clown. Here is a middle-aged man who has spent his whole life as a clown, and realizes he has no other skills, there is nothing else he can do. So he takes a bunch of odd jobs where he enacts the clown role by default, hilariously causing havoc and chaos everywhere he goes.

But the genius in the film comes from its “serious” parts. The way he cries when he finds out that he lost his job as a clown, his depression when humiliated by his brother-in-law or mean bosses, etc. There is a strange spirit of defiant anger that runs throughout, from the grotesque depictions of people in the world and their banality and small-mindedness, to Lewis’ occasional bouts of defiance towards authority figures. It’s all about how humiliating and absurd it is to live in the world and have a job, and about all the little moments that make life unbearable.

In this world of unspeakable awkwardness and grotesqueness, women and girls are his allies, and boys and men his enemies. Women and girls laugh at his jokes, seek to help him, find him endearing, and want to grow up to be like him, whereas men and boys find him to be a pathetic loser and try to oust him at every turn. From the young son of the woman he’s dating (“You’re happy to see HIM??”) to his sister’s husband, to his many bosses, males are out to get him, threatened by his affinity with women and animals and jealous of his ability to evade the rules.



When he finally quits his job at the post office (it’s the only job he can hold; as one of the character states, “no one loses a civil service job unless he wants to”), it’s because he has been asked to “take care of” some rabbits that have ended up in the post office, ostensibly by destroying them. The film thus begins with an act in which his partner is a kitten, and ends with him rescuing rabbits.

In one strange scene in the film, he suddenly stops being klutzy and does everything right when he is being watched by a superintendant. Before this he could not touch anything without making it fall over, now he is perfectly in command of himself. There are more “serious” moments, such as when he is gracious and adult when evaluating the performance of his boss. The tables have now turned. Instead of being the lowest scum of the earth, kicked around by everybody, he is now his own boss. And he proves it by delivering the mail dressed as a clown, freeing the rabbits, and quitting his job.



The film ends with him going back to being a clown, and his journey into the abject world of random jobs remains as a dream, a nightmare. It’s as if his perfect performance at his job at the post office was a way of suddenly saying, “All right, the farce is over now. I’m really a professional clown, I’m Jerry Lewis, I’m a physical comedian with full control over my faculties, see, I can do this job if I want to.” It’s like that moment in the dream where you are just about to wake up, or that moment when the actor takes off his makeup and reveals himself to the audience as his true self. But in this case he is taking off one kind of makeup—the clown he’s playing in the film, which is a “non-clown” who’s a regular person—and putting on another kind of makeup, his “literal” clown makeup, in which he can finally be himself—Jerry Lewis!

So we have to wonder: who is Jerry Lewis? Is it the actor-writer-director Jerry Lewis we are looking at, or are we simply watching a character in a movie? We see both at once, and that’s the genius of the movie. It’s an actor watching himself, watching his whole career and also watching the end of a career. As in the move “Limelight,” the wrenching sadness we feel is in knowing the history of his earlier work, and how the ugliness of the world he is depicting is a world in which he can no longer thrive, as a clown from another era who is losing his audience to newer tastes, younger entertainers.



Some of the sight gags in the movie are brilliant and get quite surreal, as in one where he delivers mail to a Goodyear blimp and ends up taking the blimp for a ride, and another where a housewife offers him a beer and the Clydesdale-drawn Budweiser truck drives by and tosses him a six-pack. But in spite of its rampant silliness, the movie is strangely subversive and sad, and is Jerry Lewis’ comic and reflective tribute to his own brilliant career.

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

Travelogue—Some Film Festivals this Year

Stockholm, Gijon, Torino
Jared and I just returned from a European tour which consisted of Stockholm, Gijon (Spain), and Torino. Quite extraordinary all around. Highlights were meeting Tinto Brass in Torino and talking shop (we may share a distributor, and I told him about how my life was changed by seeing Caligula as a child), the Asturian cider house (and actually everything about Spain and the Spanish), the Italian hyper-intellectual audiences (and of course the food), and the serious (Bergman-fed) Swedes and their formal dinners. We met a lot of interesting and charming people on this trip, including filmmakers, press, sexologists, and cinephiles.

Gijon and Torino honored me with retrospectives, and I was followed around by photographers, who took glamour shots all over, including some in a vintage Mercedes (see below). The Gijon catalogue stated (and I quoted to a shocked audience on opening night), that whereas the character is Peeping Tom used his camera as an aggressive phallus, Anna Biller uses her camera like a "playful, extroverted clit.” {more}



On this tour I found that I am capturing more women. Women in Italy especially loved the movie. I think it’s partly because in Italy there is not a stigma attached to the idea of a glamorous woman. Italy still attaches a spiritual and maternal significance to women's beauty, from the Madonnas in the churches to Sophia Loren and Claudia Cardinale. But older intellectual men in beautiful suits were also nodding appreciatively when I spoke about gender, and everyone clapped when I said that I don’t think strong women should be like men. The Italian audience was the most educated and intellectual audience I’ve ever played to. I bought a number of erotic comic books and “Diabolik” pulps there, which I will write about the next time.

In Sweden we ate at a restaurant that was in a 17th century mansion. The lead actress of “Fanny and Alexander” was there, along with Paul Schrader, a lot of other directors, some writers, and some Swedish dignitaries. We ate herring, reindeer, etc. It was all very formal and old-fashioned. We also went to an ice bar, where you had to be fitted with a special parka before entering in order to not perish of cold. At my screening, the audience was very sad. They were almost pleading with me, “But does it have to be that way for Barbi?” The women especially seemed distressed. Later, the programmer told me that Swedish audiences are sad “because of Bergman.”



Spain was fabulous in every way. The filmmakers, festival people, and press were always in a great mood, ready to drink, play, and talk excitedly in all languages (I spoke mostly French). We ate dinner at 11:00 and were out at nightclubs until 4:00 or 5:00. They were taking pictures like crazy, and I was treated like the movie queen of the festival, which was fun. I am finding that they like to treat people like celebrities in Europe. After all, for all they know I could be quite famous in America! It's the opposite of Los Angeles, where even the biggest celebrities are treated like regular people. Someone in Sweden actually chased after Jared as he was getting into a car to get his autograph!

Moscow
In the summer we showed VIVA in competition at the Moscow Film Festival, which was quite an honor. Moscow is a place where the people are very real, very fierce, very smart, and speak their minds freely. It is a transitional culture, full of generational and aesthetic clashes, and with a large class and economic gap. The women were the best dressed I have seen in any city. They all wear makeup, do their hair, and wear sexy, fitted dresses, skirts, heels, and stockings. The food is fresh, exotic, organic, exciting. Restaurants are the privilege of the rich and of foreigners. The mix of Soviet, capitalist, and antique architecture is breathtaking and surreal. And of course, there’s the famous subway, with its monumental art treasures, bronze statues, art nouveau lighting, and large expanses of marble.

We created a near riot in Moscow with VIVA, which some hailed as a Fellini-like masterpiece, and which one newspaper claimed was a disgrace to the festival and to the nation itself. I think some people there were missing the irony, especially as they never had a sexual revolution. But some people, especially young people, were filled with joy at the the colors and the sexiness of it. (They do love color in Russia)! They do everything big in Moscow: the longest red carpet I have ever seen, lavish parties, all like something out of a 60s movie about rich people. They took thousands of pictures of us, but I don’t have a single one! And we were offered distribution by a Russian distributor (more news on that later).

One day we took a tour of the film studio there, Mosfilm, where all the great Russian classics were shot. We went in a bus with a group of people and saw some wonderful props, costumes, headdresses, sketches, stills, soundstages, automobiles, etc. At the end of it all we were led out to a wooded area where there was music playing and they were roasting a pig and a lamb on spits, and served us lots of salads, wine, etc. It was quite fabulous.

We've also been to Melbourne and Montreal this year, which were both great. The Fantasia Festival in Montreal lead to Canadian distribution, and we will open in various cities in Canada February with different burlesque troupes, including Skin TIght Outta Sight, which will be quite something! In addition, we are opening in Antwerp this month, and I will present VIVA at Brown University and at the George Eastman House in April of next year. See the screenings page for more information.

Melodrama

Almost all movies nowadays are about men and their tasks. Some movies are about women and romance, but those movies tend not to be complex or honest, and they very often leave out the question of the female as a sexual creature with her own primal needs. She is just like a man, only sappier and less in control of her feelings. She is often mediocre and scared, and she needs a man to “fill” her in the worst way. She is not a creature of power and creativity.

If one were to make a study of great moments in film that were satisfying to women, one would have to look no further than the 1940s or 1950s melodrama. This form reached its zenith around 1960, then quickly withered away after that. These movies form a complex picture of women’s psychological needs and fears, and cover such preoccupations as aging, beauty, motherhood, betrayed love, dangerous love, money and sex, women who will do anything for a man, women gone bad for men, women used by men for profit, women who are bad seeds, nymphomaniacs, adultery, shame; basically, all of the most basic emotional concerns of women.

Some of the most interesting from my point of view are those that pose philosophic questions about aging or beauty, such as Mr. Skeffington, A Woman’s Face, Torch Song, Sunset Boulevard, Female on the Beach; those that are about a woman’s ability to be destroyed by wanting love, such as Madame X, Vertigo, Duel in the Sun, Letter to an Unknown Woman, Leave Her to Heaven, The Red Shoes; those that are about woman’s own destructive or otherwise transformative sexual power, such as The Strange Woman, Double Indemnity, Niagara, Gilda, The Killing, The Birds; those that have to do with a woman’s lot in life, such as Aventurera, Madame Bovary, Mildred Pierce, The Hard Way, The Postman Always Rings Twice; and comedies that paint a positive picture of the power of female sexuality, such as all musicals and “comic blonde” farces.

The powerhouses of women’s cinema—Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Barbara Stanwyk, Ida Lupino, Olivia de Haviland, Jennifer Jones, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe, Kim Novak, Irene Dunne, Vivienne Leigh, Myrna Loy, Marlene Dietrich, Gene Tierney, Hedy Lamarr, Gloria Grahame, Lauren Bacall, Jean Simmons, and a whole host of others too numerous to name—were required to play a double standard in all of their roles which was first of all intended to be powerfully sexy, and second, virtuous. Any painted lady, however crass, was required to have a heart of gold if she was to survive the narrative. Actresses had replaced the holy virgin in Hollywood’s new pantheon of cinema gods and goddesses, and they needed to have that touch of the wholesome to drive men mad with desire and also to produce strong identification in women. The result was a cinema world populated by impossibly sexy, beautiful, well-dressed, glamorous, and internally virtuous women, with dulcet voices, the posture and movements of a dancer, and always with the right thing to say.

How I long for those glamorous screen sirens today, looming in shimmering nitrate silver or Technicolor in hand-beaded gowns. I also long for their problems, for the way in which those problems are rooted in social reality, and for the seemingly universal concern that people had for their problems. Their sexuality was of a powerful and seething nature, and they were always fascinating. The screenwriters, directors, producers, the whole Hollywood machine, knew how to maximize a woman’s luring power to the utmost, so much so that if nudity were added to it, it would have been an unbearable cocktail. One only has to try to imagine Duel in the Sun with a nude Jennifer Jones to understand what I mean by that.

The Erotic Witch

I’ve been doing more research on witchcraft lately. The most interesting book has been The World of the Witches, by Julio Caro Baroja. He traces the figure of the witch from classical times to the present. What is interesting is, he says that the rationalist approach, which states that all witchcraft is nonsense and doesn’t exist except in the mind, is “going a bit too far.”

Some of the fascinating ideas in this book include the fact that witchcraft is about REBELLION and the SHADOW SIDE OF THINGS, and that the sympathy or harmony which exists between like things and the antipathy between unlike things is what constitutes MAGIC. Also, magic is connected to DESIRE AND WILL, and a magician can only attack the IRRATIONAL part of an individual.

Other ideas in the book:

LOVE, for the witch, is a consuming passion.

Magic is an answer to the DESPAIR men and women feel at living in a world beyond their control.

There is always an element of SHAM and FRUSTRATED DESIRE that underlies magic.

EROTIC APPETITES pave the way for magical processes.

Witchcraft is one of the most ANTOSICIAL ACTIVITIES.

The devil gets hold of people, and makes them TIRED OF LIFE, or TEMPTS THEM, or CORRUPTS THEM.

The witch elicits reactions of both TERROR and MOCKERY in people.

Another book I read was What you always Wanted To Know About Sex in Witchcraft, *but were afraid to ask, written by Hastur. With a black and white porn photo on every page, the book attempts to describe the reality of sex practices in covens, between sex magic partners, and throughout history. The book contains very little information, and is mostly an attempt to titillate the novice reader and sexual voyeur. (The photo above is the tamest photo I could find from this book).

I also read Anton Lavey’s book The Compleat Witch: Or, What to do when Virtue Fails, which is a treatise on how women can use their innate witchy powers to snare a man. It’s mostly a case of special pleading for classic sex appeal, as he urges women to throw away their pantyhose in favor of stockings, and to wear three-inch spike heels and dresses that look like the drawings of women in cartoons in men’s magazines. He even extols the virtues of slightly stained undergarments, which are supposed to conjure up the lure of the forbidden.

Much of the book is about trying to appear as the opposite type of the man you are trying to seduce, and he compares people to numbers on a clock with dominant types on the top of the clock, submissive on the bottom, thinking types on the right and feeling types on the left. The logic here is very thin, but the book is amusing as a piece of history. It seems that in the early 70s there were simply too many witches, so the book was written to help certain witches to elevate themselves above others, which in this case amounts to pure and simple desirability and seductive power.

It seems that many of the books written to help witches are about helping females to increase their desirability, and that this concept has been around for a long time. The Greek witches were mostly match-makers and makers of perfumes, aphrodisiacs, cosmetics and love potions, and many medieval witches were prostitutes. One of the main functions of witches throughout history has been to assist in love matches for others, and to secure the men they personally desired for themselves. There has always been an erotic element to the witch, mixed with an element of fear.

The renewed interest in the 60s and 70s with witch novels and movies I think can be attributed to a new interest in uncovering everything female. This meant her body, her soul, her desires, her primal powers, her anatomy. Because of a sudden and meteoric loosening of censorship laws, the female became territory to be openly explored, and men lost no time doing exactly this. There was also a renewal of interest in all things pagan and non-western, and a desire to go back to earlier social structures, which included matriarchy and goddess worship. But with the rise of pornography and its relegation to a specialty underground audience, this interest in woman as a special creature died on a cultural level and was never revived. But you can still see it very strongly in texts and films from that period.

“Black magic” is and always has been about the erotic, and about the primal fear of women. This concept of witchcraft and magic is now seen as hopelessly archaic, as modern witches make sweet-smelling potions out of olive oil, anise, nutmeg, and cinnamon, and try to make everyone feel good about themselves with hippy-dippy self-help spells. Its value as a religion notwithstanding, there is always, as Baroja noted, a tragic element attached to these gestures, the desperate attempt to find a solution to the dreariness of living and frustrated desire through the use of magic and spells.

This is the element about witches and witchcraft that I find most interesting: the way that it becomes a last resort when reality fails to provide the necessary hope, and when simple delusions no longer work. The subject as material for a film is difficult, but if treated properly it can be a powerful examination of social ritual and desire.

Witchcraft

On the way to Moscow I read a really interesting book called “Witchcraft,” by Pennethorne Hughes. It was quite inspiring, in that it laid out the history of witchcraft as a religion that was a bastardized form of older pagan religions. I realized after reading it that much of the landscape of The Wicker Man with Christopher Lee must have been taken from this sort of history. In that film, and in this book, it was suggested that in certain isolated pockets in Europe--in Britain especially-- Christianity had never quite penetrated, and there lurked odd folkways and traditions.

It was suggested that in certain places the folkways persisted. The practitioners of these older customs were either simple serfs and country people who continued practicing an older, classical/pagan religion, or neo-Paleolithic peoples around the British isles and in parts of Europe, who were driven back into their caves and forests by medieval invaders. This is apparently where the legends about brownies, fairies, sprites, and leprechauns come from. Fairies were essentially witches, and practiced the same religion. The religion was not a devil-worshipping one, but a pagan one, and much of it was about fertility rites, moon cults, knowledge of medicinal herbs, and spells and sacrifices to make things grow or prosper.

Eventually there were many new converts to this “religion” throughout the middle ages. Conversion was especially popular with women, cynics of Christianity, rebels, intellectuals, heretics, people who wanted free access to sex, etc. Eventually elements of devil-worshipping emerged as the new witchcraft became a parody of Christianity, and that’s when we start having instances of the converts kissing the devil’s ass, signing contracts in blood, mocking Christian rituals, and going to Sabbaths. Somehow reading about the types of people who gravitated towards witchcraft in the middle ages reminded me of the kinds of people practice witchcraft and spells nowadays, or in the hippie culture of the 1960’s.


I was struck by that hippie element when I was reading this witchcraft book and watching The Wicker Man, and it made sense to me why films and books about witches were so popular in the 1960’s. First there is that sense of nature and getting back to basics, then there is the whole woman-power thing, then there is the hippie-dippy new-age spells and magic culture. Somehow the image of Victorian fairies sitting on toadstools and Donovan with his pipe in The Pied Piper blend together in my mind, as well as women selling sachet packets at the Renaissance Faire, shops full of incense and mystic crystals, fantasy art, unicorns, rainbows, gypsy and gothic fashion, massage oils, tattoos, tarot, and everything else associated with the anguished Western person’s desire to break out, or the woman’s desire to become a powerful and sexually desired goddess.



Of course the objects and culture associated with witchcraft and fairies today is quite flaky and in bad taste, which I realize with some horror I am starting to quite enjoy. New-age culture, which I have always detested, has been growing on me lately in quite a natural way. While I was in Melbourne recently, I was squealing over all of these horrible shops containing bad pseudo-Victorian fairy art, giant Carnelian silver rings, driftwood hat-racks, and foil-stamped shiny unicorn boxes. I even bought a “fairy mirror,” and a sort of magical “fairy pendant,” and Jared bought “wizard jewelry.” There is something quite new about it for me, as it’s an area I’ve never gone into, although for many others it must seem quite clichéd. Suddenly I have fresh eyes for new-age and sentimental treasures which I would have scoffed at a month ago. And I am also inspired by fairy-unicorn environments which hold primal girl power, such as the images in Junko Mizuno's drawings.


These objects, though, are informing a narrative, as much as the flowered couch prints and vinyl faux-marble ice buckets informed the narrative of Viva. I’m starting to imagine Jared as a screen wizard in an open robe, with his new wizard jewelry, a thoroughly decadent theater or circus manager who is really the devil (much like Roman in Rosemary’s Baby, or the devil in The Virgin Witch). I think my interest in witches started originally with fairy tales, which I really love, but when I think about making a film about it, it gets quickly perverted into all of these other depressing and all too realistic characters and objects, which is how I see life after all. It’s the realism intruding always, the compromise and the shattering of the mythic replaced by the everyday.

A scene which keeps sticking with me is one in which a naked witch smears herself from her toes to her head with magical ointment, then lays down and has a drug trip which turns into a scary and erotic dream. The ointment that witches used was apparently hallucinogenic, and often caused dreams where they thought they were flying, hence the flying on a broomstick legend. I thought there could be this really erotic scene, with a beautiful black-haired naked witch covered in ointment, writhing around and dreaming wishfully about what would happen at the sabbath.